TIL: The majority of child abuse perpetrators are women.
via reddit.com
By “majority” they mean “53.5%” which is an interesting number because more than 80% of abuse is carried out by a parent and if you check the proportions of families where women are involved v. families where men are involved it’s apparent that men are disproportionately likely to inflict abuse despite technically making up a smaller percentage of total abusers. Households with both a man and woman make up 69% of total parent arrangements, then 23% are single mother households, while single father households make up just 4%. So despite women being present in 92% of parenting arrangements while men are present in just 73% men still manage to commit almost half of child abuse, plus the data doesn’t analyse gender v. type of abuse and the figures cover everything from neglect to physical and sexual abuse and I think we can agree that these are not in any way equivalent forms of abuse (not that neglect is excusable but sexual abuse is clearly a worse offense). Yeah tho, this is why statistics matters, these numbers are meaningless without context.
The original data used is also screwy. By far, most cases recorded are neglect (60.2%), not physical abuse (10.2%) or sexual abuse (6.3%). The neglect numbers include some instances of children’s removal from households where a sole legal guardian (disproportionately likely to be an impoverished single Black mom) was involved in a legal issue entirely unrelated to children.
CPS tends to use “neglect” as a catchall, e.g. when removing kids from parents or guardians who’ve violated parole or are else placed under arrest (not guilty or necessarily even charged). An added neglect case makes it easier to hold someone in custody and push a plea (which could be about a bounced check—literally any infraction), and is sometimes used strategically to accomplish that.
That is, some of what’s recorded in the linked stats is down to racism and disregard of child welfare by government officials, not child abuse by female parents or guardians. And while it’d be nice to see what amount, for some reason no numbers are kept on that.
(To be clear, I’m saying this as a child abuse survivor whose own mom dodged CPS solely by virtue of income bracket.)
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